“How about this,” god and the devil had already signed a treaty some time prior as god was simply too brutal and calculating an opponent, a master in the conduct of war; satan really had no choice but to accept his plush exile and his secondary status in hell (which he felt resembled Vegas in the summer in any case). They were broaching the question of the image and subsequent creation of man again, bickering like children over plastic toys. “How about for every sixty or seventy kilos of meat in every man you create in your image, you let me throw in an ounce or so of my pure, unadulterated evil?” He paused grinning. “I mean you can’t totally handicap me here and make me completely reliant on some unwieldy army of bureaucrat demons to possess people! The overhead alone on that kind of operation would bankrup-” God interrupts, stroking his cottony white beard, “You want me to let you be a part of the image of man?” The reverberations from his soft chuckles creates most of Asia and reality television. “Listen. I have already decided that my being the sole entity from which the image of man should be derived is already going to be an important part of the book I’m going to ghostwrite so that man is righteous and divine and my PR people all completely agree on this.”

Satan sat patiently listening and replied when the rumbling of god’s voice began to dissipate, “Yeah, I know you’re going to create the religion thing and have some book confusing, self-contradictory narrative written so you can see who truly has ‘faith’ and find out who the ‘true believers’ are, despite my thought that it would seem much simpler and far kinder to just show yourself indisputably every once in awhile to prove your existence for the sake of not only man’s sanity but his eternal salvation. Look, I think it’s confusing enough with the whole race joke-” God clears his voice to be heard and the minivan comes into being. “Yes, that should prove delightful entertainment insight into man.” The devil slowly continued, “God, you see, you have all the advantages! Throw me a bone here!” He timed this plea perfectly so that it was uttered at the very moment god was being draped in his brand new custom-tailored 20% cashmere 80% angel tongue robe and he was off guard. “Fine, satan, you can have the smallest bone in every man created to do with it what you will and it will be infinitesimal in size,” God lit up the heavens with a sly smile. “And I know you think big things come in small packages,” The devil sits in his rocking chair, one leg crossed over the other. A smug sophisticate. God continues. “But I said you could have that small part of man for yourself and my word is, well, it is the word of fucking god so the deal is done.” The devil sat dispassionately. “Now. Dear satan, do pass that mirror with that white stuff on it you plan on growing in South America with that rolled up dollar bill please.”

The first generation Boxes were buggy as hell, they’d power off and you’d die, they would get hacked and you’d spend 60 years staring at a Cambodian golden shower video on repeat, they would sometimes even have system failures and you would see, hear, and feel nothing but complete blackness for eternity.

When LiveTech came out with Box 19.5 it was finally the product it was meant to be and it was almost perfect by every account. 94% of humanity was plugged in, 22 trillion beings stacked like anchovies at the LiveTech warehouses for barely pennies. The golden age of technology was upon us and no one could say with any legitimacy that it was better outside the Box than in, it was a horrifying, painful world outside the perfect comfort of the Box and no one wanted any part of it. At orientation, or birth as it was once referred to, LiveTech explained life before the Box in stunning detail and showed how the Box was life perfected.

The Box was invented in 2042 by a certain Dr. H.L. Heigel and he chose these as his last words before he continued on to his digital death: “The Box will forever and always be the epitome of human existence.” The Box made earth livable again for all the trillions of its inhabitants and it saved humanity from extinction after we found we were incapable of living on any other planet; after the great space colony failures Heigel declared: “Now, we must find a way to live within ourselves, the search turns inwards.” He paved a way for humanities massive population to live on earth and to live with pleasure insurmountable.

The Box isn’t actually a box, it certainly doesn’t feel like living in a “box” and it doesn’t look like a box. Rather, it looks like an adult in the fetal position covered in green holographic currents that click and chirp and buzz and beep according to whatever algorithm the person in that Box is using. Every Box is essentially a simulated existence, although that term is frowned upon because people hate to think they aren’t living “real” lives and in 2067 the word “simulation” and “simulated” we’re deleted from the LiveTech mainframe and there are less problems with that now, of course.

There are countless human beings climbing Mount Everest every day in their Box, having sex 900 times a week with 900 different, beautiful, disease free people, writing novels at cafe’s in 19th century Paris, watching lions eat Christians in the great Roman Coliseum, flying through space and time ignoring the laws of physics or perhaps just drinking orange juice in the mornings with their children all in the same millisecond. No human before the era of the Box could ever have imagined a life so full and rich and a reality so colorful with such purpose and beauty and possibility. The Box allows anyone, the poor, the rich, the tall and handsome, the short and ugly, the graceful, the beleaguered and depressed and stupid and genius to become whatever it is they want and to do whatever it is they want to do without any limitations, all through electricity flowing through your brain. It is the ultimate expression of humanity. It is the great equalizer. You feel like a beautiful woman accompanying you to your first Nobel prize acceptance speech in Prague or perhaps you feel like racing a Ferrari through 1998 Los Angeles, the Box is capable of letting you do anything you want whenever you want however you want simply by allowing you to tap into its vast network of preprogrammed experiences and all you have to do is think it and it becomes your reality. The Box transformed and elevated human existence for everyone. LiveTech’s motto is: Be Anyone Doing Anything!

In the past the majority of the population of earth could expect short, dull lives of dreadful poverty and hunger for food and water. Even the more fortunate people born in industrialized nations were usually bored, fighting wars, or sick. The days when men slaved all day at menial labor with no meaning for little reward and women had excruciating pregnancies with horrifying, painful births and slaved over the tedious children they produced all day are gone. There is no longer the need for government, lest you call LiveTech and it’s Final Maintenance Committee a government, there are no countries or wars, there is no class or political struggle, and during the last official Happiness Index there was almost 100% Happiness. Even religion has been relegated to the trashbin in this new world. If life is perfect and every desire is fulfilled, there is so little time to think about anything else.

You can get married in a Box, have Christmas with your perfect family on the top of a cloud in a Box, and even father a child in a Box. There is truly only one thing you cannot do when you are in a Box, and no one is really bothered or thinks much about this single limitation anymore. You cannot leave the Box. You are born into your own latest generation Box and you die in that very same Box. No one would ever leave their Box so the issue is largely irrelevant, people are too busy using their imaginations to tap into and add to the vast meta-library at LiveTech’s Preprogrammed Life Experience Database and of these experiences, there are infinite possibilities. Everyone finally content with life. The epitome of human existence.

I was born into my Box and I never had a thought cross my mind about leaving my Box, the network usually deletes these glitch ideas anyway with their Bliss Protection Agency programs so that we don’t have to worry about them. I was born into a late generation Box and so I had very little if anything to complain about. Life was better than good. I was living in perfection, the epitome of human existence. We all knew what life was like in the days before the Box revolutionized human life and we all knew the horror of war and disease and marriage and divorce and physical pain. When I was born I went through orientation or what you might call an introduction to human life pre-Box and I stood among the dead in horrible battlefields watching the pointless carnage over politics or religion, I watched disease ravaged bodies in hospitals waste away in pain and suffering, I saw the overcrowded slums of Mombasa and the criminals of the pre-Box cities stealing and raping and murdering people. No, I had no desire to leave my Box and its ultimate perfection. No one could conceive of anything other than the perfect, painless, freedom of the Box.

I can’t account for what happened. Perhaps it was a glitch at LiveTech’s Central Division of Technology or perhaps one of the few remaining employees they kept outside the Box for physical maintenance of hardware got the bright idea to unplug some people against their will and violate the conduct sections of Network and disconnect them from the confines of their digital utopian bliss. I don’t know and I doubt I ever will. I just know what happened after.

I was with a beautiful, perfectly proportioned brunette in a lavish bed in silk sheets in a penthouse at the top of a grand hotel in what used to be London and then I felt something I had never felt before: physical pain. Darkness. I felt my body creaking as the various aches that ran through it manifested and my eyes opened and adjusted to a dim light in a massive warehouse center and as I looked around me I saw millions or maybe billions of people of various sizes and shapes in the fetal position covered in this translucent, wavy green holographic electricity stacked on ledges all the way to the ceiling around these huge circular towers, all of them enclosed in the same glowing, pulsing electric light. None of them looked awake but I could see how each person would twitch and I imagined these twitches to be whatever experience they believed they were having taking place in their brains.

I climbed down from my rack after removing the various adaptors and plugs I found protruding from my body, they were plugged into a kind of metallic tower that rose up to what I imagined to be the top of the ceiling many times over for each circular stack of glowing green, twitching, fetal bodies. The muscles in my body quivered and ached but they weren’t completely atrophied somehow so I began to climb down to the ground. At first I was so disoriented that I didn’t know which way the ground was but after some time I began to get used to the feeling of my body and its movements and I found that I was able to use my eyes and ears to determine where I wanted to go. In my Box I had never before experienced the laws of physics, people flew or jumped or walked depending on whatever program they felt like using, I was now at the mercy of gravity and as I inched around trying to make sense of this new world it became apparent that this body I had never seen before wasn’t capable of much beyond moving clumsily and with difficulty. I inched my way down, climbing down stepping gingerly from each small shelf to the one below it and I realized I came to the bottom rather quickly and this is what makes me believe still that someone unplugged me deliberately. The ground was a matter of balance and I took my first steps trying to find mine. I spent a long time just walking toward a light, it was a different light, brilliant and golden, that was unlike the glowing green everywhere else or any light I had ever seen before and I just walked straight in that direction until I finally approached a large door with a red button in its center. Whatever was behind the door was the source of that yellowish light that drew me toward it and the light spilled from the borders of the door into the dark facility.

I pressed the red button and a gush of depressurized air could be felt releasing and I heard something click and the door unlocked and slowly slid open and I saw the yellow light becoming larger until the door vanished completely. I was staring at something I had never seen. I walked out into the hot sun and felt the warmth of a thousand days in the Box compressed into a single moment and a rush of air carried by the wind blowing into my face and onto my body that felt like nothing I had ever felt before and I walked boldly forward into this new realm. I looked down and saw that I was on the lip of a great valley and I saw the massive warehouses that filled the valley and I felt the great humming being exuded from the warehouse behind me and the warehouses in the valley below me and this great buzzing electronic vibrations led me to my first philosophical realization as a real, non-digital person: this electronic heartbeat I could feel running through and around me, carried by the wind, was life inside the Box. A great cadence of pulsing and throbbing currents flew around the warehouses and I realized that I had lived in these currents, that everyone plugged into a Box was at this moment just a buzzing electricity conducted by a grand machine.

My first instinct was to escape the throbbing pulse and I ran, slowly at first, higher up, until I reached the absolute peak of the valley upon which lay a large collection of trees where a small rugged footpath of dead plants and soil lay in the center. I started down this trail away from the great digital throbbing and I found myself in a clearing where I found a blackened pit where a fire had once been. I touched the burnt logs and felt soot come away on my finger and as I stared at the black dust on my hand I heard something like a voice but different, more human than I had ever heard. I can’t explain how everything was in a way the same but so much different but this is how it was.

It was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes and the color and feel of the world had some kind of added dimension that I never knew existed. I walked toward the voice I thought I had heard. At the end of the clearing was another trail and I entered a darker, thicker forest and walked through it, through thorny bushes that scraped my pale skin leaving small bloody lacerations and huge hanging leaves from gigantic trees that held dewy condensation which I drank from and past giant spider webs that caught on my face. I walked for what seemed like forever until I began to see the forest thinning out, the trees becoming less thick, the plants covering the ground receding behind me back into the depths of the middle of the deep wood from which I was emerging from.

I stared out from the edge of the forest upon a great blue water and I saw and felt and heard the white waves thrash the beach becoming foam running up the sand. I walked out of the forest back into the sunlight and I looked across at a panorama of blue ocean under blue sky and it was endless, I could see neither the beginning nor the end and it was as if the entire world was surrounded by this thrashing, living force. I walked, naked feeling the sand caressing my feet and the sun and its warm, decadent radiance upon my body and as I walked feeling these things I saw a group of children with dark golden skin playing at the edge of the beach by the foamy water. I heard them laughing as each wave crashed, running toward the water and away from it as if to tease a great beast. As I walked I threw my hands out up at the sun in the sky and as I walked toward the children I used my voice for the first time to howl in joy.

I’ve had a thousand experiences with astonishingly demented sociopath sadist pseudo-medicine men physicians during my grand tour of all the rehabs in the universe but this is the one scumbag with a DEA license that beats them all, just cooks it black and crispy, raw meat cooked with a blow torch. This guy, I forget his name but his name isn’t important. He’s short, so he’s got the short-man complex and he’s small and square and jagged like a block of wood, burning fire internally and his eyes, it was in his eyes where you could see what he wanted, his needs, right there the beady little black fucking abominations that allowed him his vision, that the world tolerated the rapturous desecration of everything upon his gaze itself is somewhat mind boggling. Fucking animal, this “healer of men”. Like I said, it was ALL in the EYES, each eyeball having a different sort of sick and twisted agenda, each eye speaking its own language of hate and malice and deception and iniquity.

He was a machine built in hell’s own garage by the Devil himself, so help me God.

Dr. Brand, that’s his godforsaken fucking name. That man, if that is what you would call him, the things he did to me, fuck. We’ll get there. So let me explain first how I came to be in his possession. See, guys like me, we like drugs. Hard drugs. Good drugs. Bad drugs. Scary drugs. Mean drugs. Nice drugs. DRUGS. We like fucking getting fucking high as fucking shit. Around that time it was the Ketamine slash MDMA era, meaning for those that don’t know, I was playing with some very entertaining toys that affected some very special and sensitive parts of my silly little puddle of a brain. I don’t know how I can still spell T H E after all the fucking ketamine I snorted and injected. Anyhoot, I walked into this fuckers rehab smiling at flowers and basically sporting a skull with a brain inside that was in remission and upside down and inside out, the fucking thing was not working right and I was up for grabs for any sadistic motherfucker that would have it like that so thank the good Lord himself King/Queen Dahmer wasn’t around cause I would’ve been one of his masks he liked to wear around the house casually. I mean, really, I was very, very scrambled. Look, I was talking to myself, smoking huge cigars in the rain in a tank top and shorts at bus stops, hunting for nonexistent bags of cocaine with my Labrador in a suit and tie on the beach in the middle of the night, shit like that. You get the fucking picture. ALSO, please care to note that ketamine is what is commonly referred to as a dissasociative drug (its legitimate use is anesthesia for cats and horses and the other four leggers): but with human beans, you unbecome yourself experiencing ego death, you are not you, there is no you. Right. Okay. Hold on tight, grab a loved ones hand.

So, my non-self is sleeping in this shitty non-house with a cracked, crooked foundation and two rotating shifts of fat Mexicans handing out the rehab pills but wait! The fucking nurse bitches are handing out narcotics, it’s not hard to tell when you’re in a rehab jonesing so hard you would take on Tyson in his heyday for half a vicodin so word gets around, you know? So I am completely Stanley Kubricked out right now, cannot process this insanity, I just can’t make any of this make sense to me; they’re handing out morphine and oxycontin to the patients in a rehab? What the fuck kind of devious plot have they entrapped me in this time, jesus fucking christ. You shall see, my friend, you shall see.

So I’m in this scam rehab which Dr. Brand has created as essentially a pain clinic practice with a few houses to stuff some junkies in and it’s all intermingled and mixed up like salad and it makes no sense but he’s making great money, I mean, what junkie doesn’t want to go to rehab and get their pharmaceutical fix and be told that that is the correct treatment methodology? All of em do stupid! God you’re dumb.

Anyway the first time I get in the van and they take me to the “office” and he sees my drooping, amused face, eyes wandering around innocently like so many balloons in the sky at a local carnival he immediately targets me for extreme punishment, brainwashing, and physical and psychic pain and I could not have been an easier target, it was like I was a small child being told by a massive tattooed rapist that I could get a ride home if need be, and accepting that ride because the child was lost, and god damn if my child wasn’t lost as shit, deep in the slums.

He immediately barks at one of his nurses “Two milligrams intramuscular Ativan, stat!” and I fucking love benzodiazepines so I’m like YAY! and I pull my pants down and take a nice shot, stinging in my butt like some dramatic part in a symphony. Ahhh, relaxxxxeeeeed. “Come into my office, let me get to know what’s going on with you so I can help you to recover.” I oblige. And then it starts.

Note this if you may. Now. To be honest, my biggest problem as a writer writing autobiographically is that I have taken so many fucking benzodiazepines (xanax, valium, klonopin, ativan, serax) I have no memory or what little memory I have is very foggy and vague, like you can see the lighthouse through the storm, but only because you can see the light IN the lighthouse because without the light there is no lighthouse in my world. Good, I’m glad we’re together on this.

So I can’t tell you every single fucking word this evil cretin spit out at me in my very suggestible, relaxxxxeeed, ativan filled state, but let us just say this: he convinced me my parents hated me (opposite of the truth although they should), that I was probably gang raped by an entire Mexican drug cartel at some satanic initiation ritual in the desert when I was 8 or 12 and all other types of sordid insane shit. He was just having his little fun with me, toying around, and I had no where to go because my mind, it was weak, it was weak, my mind it was Edgar Allen Poe delirious and dying in the streets of London, collapsed, my mind it was Tyson after years of drugs getting a Maori tattoo and fighting MMA, my mind it was weak, it was the bodies’ antibodies trying to fight off the bubonic plague without penicillin, I mean WEAK. I had no defense whatsoever and he would bring me in every fucking day, unlike the other people in the house, and just sit me in an exam room and mindfuck me for hours, I mean this guy really, really was enjoying himself and who am I to say NO to a fucking shot of ativan, what are you kidding? I absolutely love that shit, I live for it. I knew what he was doing but I liked the ativan poke in my butt so I kinda just let it happen, like a girl that really doesn’t want to have sex but says “Fuck it, I’ll get something out of this, maybe some perfume.” The perfume was my ativan was my perfume was the ativan. So, I let him fuck me between the ears every day.

Okay, so that’s happening every day and each day I am becoming more and more lucid and my head is clearing up from all the lovely chemistry experimentation I performed in there and I begin to pace around the empty pool at the house calling my mom begging for her to come rescue me from this evil sadist fuck. No. Fuck.

Then it happens.

It’s sunny and I assume I’m going for another fucking glorious mindfuck session plus some ativan if I’m a good boy and do as the nice doctor tells me and I repeat after him type shit. I arrive at his office and I’m sitting there in his waiting room reading a pamphlet on how suboxone saved some Mexican woman’s life from heroin addiction and how a housewife in Wisconsin, formerly addicted to oxycontin, believes it to be essentially the same as insulin for a diabetic. [I AM COMING OFF SUBUTEX/SUBOXONE (SAME THING) RIGHT NOW AGAIN AS I WRITE IT IS NOT GOOD IT IS NOT EASY TO GET OFF OF IT IS A HELLISH, EVIL, HORRIFYING SUBSTITUTE ADDICTION THAT WILL EAT YOUR HEART AND LIVER AND SPLEEN AND MAKE A SALAD WITH IT AND SERVE IT TO YOU WITH A NICE VINEGARETTE SPRINKLED WITH THE PEPPERCORNS OF YOUR BROKEN SOUL] Where was I? Oh. Right. The waiting room, waiting, waiting for my ativan brainwashing therapy injection conference. The short little ignoble goblin bastard walks in and pulls my ass into the back dungeon area where he performs his Dachau experiments and he brings me to a totally different room I’ve never been privy to before and he lays me in this bizarre Hannibal Lecter leather chair contraption and begins to explain to me, and this is after a particularly massive dose of IM ativan (I believe he had his nurse adminster 4 fucking milligrams so I was on drool-mode) that my addiction wasn’t actually addiction but rather it was physical PAIN! Yes yes, physical pain emanating from my neck, yes he could tell by examining the way I walked and spoke and stood and that was my problem, yes, yes, there would be no more fuss over some so-called “heroin addiction” no, no I deserved to be treated humanely didn’t I? Of course I did and my neck, it was my neck, he knew that it was just because he knew and he was a maniacal but loving sociopathic genius and he would repair my life this moment and-

He begins to place his hard stubby fingers into the nerves in my neck so hard I begin twitching and shaking and he begets me so much pain that I am screaming now, screaming at the top of my lungs and of course he hollers for a nurse and orders me up some dopiates, I think he gave me two Lortabs that first time (equivelent to four regular Vicodin) and one 10 mg Opana and I am dizzy with pain but at the same time he’s giving me the drug I love so I am bound to him in our chemical romance and as I stagger away from his torture center he walks up behind me all cool and casual and does his neck pinch again, just once, a few nurses and patients around and DROPS ME TO MY MOTHERFUCKING KNEES with a pinch, I mean I gotta give this piece of shit fuck credit, he knew how to hit nerves god damn he did, I mean literally I am barely walking away, trying to run away after I took my pills to go smoke a cigarette and ponder all this insanity in the sun outside and he literally has the ability to walk up behind me and drop me like a fucking person falling off a building WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS MAN MADE OF? I believe he is a concoction of one part demon, one part sugar, one part black tar heroin, one part DEA, one part penitentiary rape, one part love for hatred, one part Nazi, one part Jew, one part Stalin, one part Mao, and the rest of him was basically the Khmer Rouge with Pol Pot on his left shoulder and a headless child victim of the regime on his right shoulder all singing Symphonies of brutality and damnation to him. In other words, he is a fucking MAD MAN from hell itself on steroids with his confidante being Dante’s guide. What the fuck?

My neck is fucked. He hurt me bad. I am in serious fucking pain and I am so fucking terrified that this insane doctor has injured me for life that I start calling non-stop back home to Seattle, back to headquarters of rehab placement to get me the FUCK out of THERE NOW I am being decimated by a Doctor Evil Please Help MOMMY, SERIOUSLY, this is no joke. None of that matters to them but the second I mention he gave me opiates, my dad the doctor and my mom the caretaker of a long time opiate addict switch gears quick as lightning and reverse their stance completely- apparently there is a one doctor to another conversation that takes place where there is an explanation for giving an opiate addict opiates and he tells my dad the same fucking thing, that I injured my neck playing football and THAT is the reason I keep getting high, not cause I’m an addict or anything even though I’ll snort smoke or shoot anything you have anytime you have it. My parents are not convinced of this doctors methods but they don’t immediately pull me but I don’t give this cocksucker another chance to shatter my spine any more I just won’t let him touch me, he can talk his brainwash shit, which is still in full effect AND working but no, no, he CANNOT touch my fucking, god damned neck, yeah I’m in pain and I want some painkillers dumbfuck doctor fuck face a million but you CAN’T do what you did I’m already fucked up from the one time you did touch me. His explanation is that he simply brought out the pain that was already there and I was somehow psychologically repressing, ummm yeah dude, right, just give me my pills asshole and you can tell me Hitler had me raped at God’s request I don’ fucking care.

Finally, finally, finally, in all its grand finality, I am released from the iron grip of this medical dictator torturer magician and I am moved to a new, very comfortable rehab in Malibu, California which is extremely plush and chill but which I fuck up anyway but fucking around every chance I get even though I have a king bed and gourmet food. Whatever. Got kicked out of there too, oops. I had beef with this beak-nosed counselor who I would always out-smart in group and make look like a foolish crow. Ha. Like I’m not used to being sent around to different places, psych wards, etc? Come come, this is me we’re talking about, my rehab count at this point is already in its late teens. The bitch that got me kicked out of plushville rehab was named Helen I believe and she truly needed to get fucking FUCKED out of her mind. Sorry, but she really did, dumb cunt probably couldn’t get a guy to get within ten feet of her on consideration of her nose might fly out of her face like a bald eagle and attack.

It was really just me and this obese woman, a drug counselor incidentally, in this rehab. There was the Indian that smoked heroin and bitched about his need to go drive his non-existent Porsche and the Mexican he paid for his dope, how he wanted to kill this fucker. He was a farce- but fuck he was built like a fucking panzer tank or better, a gasoline tanker truck, I mean this massive asshole actually had a jet black pony tail! We didn’t get along after I walked in on him showering in my bathroom. Me and the Indian, no we didn’t get along at all and I left him alone but his eyes really didn’t ever leave me much alone time. So, it was all of us shuttered up in this cramped little hovel a few hundred miles north of San Diego in this post-apocalypytic wasteland suburbia apropos of hell with two twin obese freakishly round half-Mexican “caretakers” or whatever feeding us our pills and cooking bad enchiladas every single day. I mean, seriously, every day and the bulk cheese was applied like the bubonic plague in European history.

Me and the obese woman, we cliqued up right away. She was momming me and I was sonning for her and it was working beautifully at first. See, the reason she came to rehab in the first place was because she felt she needed Gastric Bypass surgery and her pain doc had her on, she said and I believed it, sixteen eighty milligram oxycontins a day plus liquid morphine to top it all off and get the cocktail tasting right. The problem here then is that with her on so much dope pain medication there would be no feasible way for this large woman to get any kind of pain control if she did happen to have gastric bypass surgery to thin her out a tad. It was all sad and amusing and we talked about her hepatitis C and her days following the dead (the grateful ones) and her son doing life in Chino and all sorts of other getting-to-know-ya shit. She took to me. She really did. I wasn’t surprised. And with sixteen eighties a day, shit, sign the adoption papers today.

The TV was the epicenter, the headquarters of the house and we watched the movie Alpha Dog continuously, which tells the true story of this little kid that’s killed with a mac 10 on a California hiking trail because of his older brother’s very insignificant drug debt. “What are we watching tonight?” You can hear the enchilada’s frying and sizzling, all that cheese, these poor fat women, Jesus. “Alpha Dog,” “Oh. Yeah, it’s good.” The Indian absolutely hated Alpha Dog and you’d hear a door slam. I liked it, kinda. I mean, shit, it wasn’t Wheel of Fortune or TV Telemundo and it pissed the Indian off.

Here’s the variable – I run out of smokes and all there is to do is sit at the table outside and smoke or watch alpha dog and eat shitty cheese smothered tortillas. So, I start bumming the obese ladies’ Camel non-filters, which she refers to as “leemacks”. The reason, she explains, is because you never want the fuzz to know what kind of cigarettes you smoke, so you smoke the unfiltered Camel’s backwards, burning up the little Camel stamp and leaving a butt with nothing but hopelessness for any homicide detective trying to find out who dun it. She learned this awhile back I take it, at least before the cops figured out DNA and fingerprinting.

I start bumming her leemacks and she isn’t very excited after I’ve devoured her 7th pack inside of 48 hours. She slows me down getting irritated. Somewhere around this time I use her nail clippers to cut my fingernails and then I remember she has hepatitis and I get a little freaked out. Uh oh, I say to myself, uh oh. I don’t want no fuckin’ interferon. Shit.

“Alex, I can’t bum you anymore smokes, I love ya but I can’t do it.” She will run out herself if I keep smoking her leemacks and I don’t want her to run out and she doesn’t want to run out and no one wants to run out of nicotine in fucking rehab because it’s fucking rehab and there are no good drugs or drinks. Bastards all of em. Burn em at the stake and pour poor liquor into their face, sober freaks.

It is time for me to get the fuck out of this pit. Post haste. No cigarettes? No, no way.

I call my friend Jamie in San Diego to come get me and he concurs. Some skinny fucker gets word that I’m leaving and comes to try to intervene and keep me hostage in the house of bubbling enchiladas and nicotine withdrawal but my mind is all made up on this one. No cigarettes? Cocksucker even offers to buy me a pack. A pack? He limps away all fatalistic away from my roaring laughter. So, I wait at this tropical Tiki Hut themed bar drinking Coronas this older woman keeps blessing me with acting as if I were Macauley Culkin before the heroin (again, I have this effect on older white women, don’t ask me why) and I’m twirling one of those little toothpick umbrellas in my mouth in the sun feeling great. Jamie makes the two and a half hour trip and I see BMW M3 pull up and I’m out like a fucking ghost in the night, although it is daylight and there is no one to put up a fight, except maybe Charlene or Chandra or whoever the old blond is, she wanted me to stay. Sorry Chayenne. She smiles wistfully and waves goodbye.

What I have not thus far mentioned is that I generated a generous benzodiazepine habit along with my usual opiate one: xanax 20 mg a day, klonopin 10 or how about I just greedily pour the fuckers down my throat as much as I can without choking to death. I would ask that the reader keep in mind that this is only really like my fifth or sixth detox/rehab and so I’m still learning the ropes, day by day. I figure that the bullshit WWI benzo the enchilada twins are feeding me (brand name Serax; extremely short half life and worthless for a buzz FYI) doesn’t mean shit and isn’t doing shit but I have yet to learn the delicacies of a benzo withdrawal…

Naturally, I assume I’ll be completely fine. And I am. Dandy. The drive back is stupendous, I’m free, free at last, from rehab and obese women with leemacks and bad enchiladas and mean heroin smoking Indians and Alpha Dog and the whole damn thing and I get to Jamies house and some dudes are sitting there on his front porch thriving on forty ouncers and blunts and I get with them and catch a taste of Cannabis Sativa and Mickeys Malt Liquor and we chill. A few hours pass and everything is all good, gravy, gratuitously great.

What’s this weird feeli-
EVERYTHING GOES INCREDIBLY FUCKING WRONG.

My heart is going to leap out of my chest like in that movie Alien with Sigourney Weaver and I start shaking like a leaf in a storm and I am burning up, red like a lobster shell with a temperature of one hundred and hell degrees. I feel as if I am about toexpire. This is definitely not opiate withdrawal. Now it’s time to find out via the internet that if you don’t titrate off benzos very slowly you catch a fun seizure and your ass goes spasmodic and you fucking die, well, my ass fucking dies. Fuck. My poor friend Jamie, my poor, poor friend, he’s happily spinning music on his turntables and I’m trying to bury myself in his couch, burrowing, burrowing. I cannot escape my biology I realize and I suddenly leap up and shriek at Jamie: “We need to go the fuck back now! I am going to die here! It will be everything but dignified! Vamanos!” I am very reluctant to return to bad enchilada land but I know they have that Serax shit there. My “brother” (yeah fucking right, Brady) who said that if I needed anything to call him and who lives literally minutes away does not answer my thousands of phone calls and text messages and who is a complete junkie pharmacist and who would have, I am certain, been able to procure me some valium or something. I’m betting Brady’s high watching the sci fi channel playing with Fentanyl patches, selfish fucking asshole. Oh, Brady recently found Jesus and sobriety after doing a year in the county after trying to kill the sky with a .357 Magnum on the roof of his moms mamsion with the cops surrounding his house and a red dot stuck to his skull. Whatever, he isn’t an option so we go and I’m riding shotgun in the M3 telling this poor child friend Jamie to hit the motherfucking gas. “Get this bastard moving, it’s an M3 isn’t it?!” We pass several police traps and I inform poor young Jamie, who has had yet to catch his own habits, to fucking fly by em’ and keep going or I will die in the county jail. As in, if a pig tries us, speeeeeeed the fuck up with the pedal directly on the motherfucking metal.

We are now about 22 minutes from our signature destination; where the Serax (still a shitty benzo, but hey, a benzo’s a benzo when your heart’s about to explode) lives and I have to piss from drinking Malt Liquor so fucking bad that I am screaming while also shaking, biting my jaw into itself so hard my mouth is a swamp of teeth, blood and bile.

Now we are 19 minutes out and the piss is just going to have to go somewhere at this point and we are not fucking stopping no fucking way my heart keeps stopping and starting and stopping and starting and I don’t want it to stop entirely the way it would if we stopped we are not stopping we are not stopping no cops no tanks no armies we are not fucking stopping Jamie do you understand James? Fucking hit the fucking gas you pussy motherfucker!

ETA 11 minutes and there’s a scramble to find a bottle, but the one I find has nothing I need, it is one of those shitty Pepsi bottles with the incredibly tiny holes. I give it a good shot, I mean I fucking try, but I got a big dickhead and while were on dickheads lets just come right out with the fact that I am a Ron Jeremy sized Dickhead for what takes place. I really do my best to get it in there but it is as if the hoover damn, or I don’t know, the entire fucking ocean is just coming up out of me and this little Pepsi bottle is just mocking me as this river of urine explodes around it and it ain’t catching much of anything at all so finally, I give up and in glorious, relieved, graceful, beautiful defeat and I just lay my ass back piss flying everywhere, a tide of piss cascading down off his seat going off into and filling up every part of his once urine-less BMW. Right as I’m squeezing out the last few drops, smiling dumbly, piss still dripping down off his seat into the pond that is his car he pulls up to the house. The look on his face is priceless as I pause, think of something to say, forget it and open the door and exit, shaking the pool of piss off of my shirt and shorts onto the street and I look at Jamie and his eyes are wide and shell-shocked like he just witnessed a murder or a fucking man die of Ebola in his car, “Uhhh, what the fuck, okay. Okay, great. Fuck. Fuck. Yeah, no problem on the ride, fuck. Oh my god, what the fuck. Yeah, I’ll see you, man. Later du-,” and as he screeches out of the drive way he makes a u-turn and it looks like he’s trying to spin the car so fast the piss will just all somehow fly out or evaporate.

My Friend Jamie, My Poor, Poor Friend Jamie.

Jamie, next time you cannot piss in my BMW when you’re coming off of your Xanax habit.

This one’s for you ol’ boy, take it like an apology or something bro. I’m glad we’re still friends because if you pissed all over my M3 I may have had you murdered and thrown into a hole in the desert. Love ya, pal.